Corporate expense reporting is a crucial business process. It plays a major role in managing a company’s cash flow. As such, having an efficient expense reporting system can bring various benefits to your organisation.
For one, it provides a complete view of your company’s expenses during the budgeting and forecasting processes. It can also help prevent expense fraud and overspending to keep your finances in check.
But how do you develop and implement an efficient expense reporting system? Read on to learn about corporate expense reporting best practices that will help ensure your business’s financial success.
Keeping track of company expenses can lead to a financially healthy business. These corporate expense reporting best practices will help ensure everything goes smoothly with your business finances.
Your expense reporting policy should reflect your company’s culture and fiscal regulations. It must be clear and easy to read, leaving no room for ambiguous items. Organising and dividing relevant information and data into sections can help with this.
You can dedicate a section to the claims process, submission deadlines, available expense limits, and reimbursable expenses. The rules for the latter should also include when employees can expect the reimbursement and the possible steps to take if their claim is rejected or questioned.
Having layers of administrative complexities like pre-approvals can take too much time and discourage your employees from following your reporting process. This may even result in more costly errors. You can ensure compliance with a simple process.
Managers can speed up the reporting process by allowing remote expense checking and automating approval processes. You can do this by incorporating expense management software into your workflow. Here, employees can submit and escalate claims easily. This practice can help streamline the procedure and prevent delays from authorising necessary business expenses.
Requiring additional information and unnecessary documents will only slow down the expense reporting process. You don’t want your finance department to get overwhelmed with bulks of files just to find what they need. Asking the right details will help speed up the procedure and ease your employees’ workload to prevent burnout.
The finance department would typically request for receipts to verify business-related expenses that employees incur on the company’s behalf. Receipts should clearly state the merchant name, transaction date, list of items purchased and the total amount for it to be valid.
Requiring additional information and unnecessary documents will only slow down the expense reporting process. You don’t want your finance department to get overwhelmed with bulks of files just to find what they need. Asking the right details will help speed up the procedure and ease your employees’ workload to prevent burnout.
Companies today also use employee reimbursement software with optical character recognition (OCR) to help speed up the claims submission and reimbursement process.
Your expense reporting policy should make everyone accountable—from managers to rank-and-file employees. An error on the part of an employee should have a corresponding penalty. Similarly, managers should be made responsible for relaying the policy to their team.
Giving managers easy access to employees’ expense submissions will also encourage them to push back on non-compliant expenses. This will help them implement expense reporting rules properly while tracking your business expenses more easily.
Performing a regular audit of your expense reporting process allows you to improve and update aspects that no longer apply to the current situation.
Government regulations, technologies, and trends constantly change. Revisiting your expense process now and then can help ensure you stay compliant with laws and keep up with the latest developments in the field. Ultimately, this will help you stay ahead of the competition.
An efficient expense reporting process allows you to forecast and budget accurately throughout the year. Creating a clear policy is only one part of the solution. You’ll also need a simple and easy-to-follow procedure to avoid difficulties in implementing it.
Consider using Spenmo to speed up your expense reporting process. This end-to-end payables software brings internal spend management, automated bill payments, approval workflows, and accounting reconciliation into an integrated view.
Book a demo today to learn how we can help streamline your corporate expense reporting process.